CPC Defined

Defintion of CPC

detail from c|net infographic on CPC

CPC stands for Cost Per Click. It is one of the strategies that ad servers use to charge advertisers for ads on publishers’ sites. The most famous cost per click system is Google AdSense. Their payment structure charges the advertiser for each time a user clicks on their text based ads.

CPC is one of the more cost effective ways for an advertiser to run a campaign, since they only pay when a user takes control and actually moves to learn more by actively clicking on the advertisement.

When it comes to Google, there are two parts of their CPC system: Google Adwords®, the advertisers side, and Google Adsense®, the publishers side. Google Adwords allows advertisers to choose particular words (keywords) that match their ads with publishers who have related content.

Google Adsense allows publishers to identify areas on their sites where they would like to place an ad, then then

have an ad(s) supplied related to their content. CPC rates can vary enormously by keyword and industry. As you can see in the detail from the CPC infographic by c|net, even within an industry segment, the cost per click